Safari 5 released for Mac and Windows

With Apple’s WWDC already well underway and iPhone fever rising, the big news for Safari users on both Mac and Windows is that they can now get their hands on version 5 of Apple’s elegant web browser. Faster than ever and with a new intelligent Reader, Safari 5 looks and works better than ever.

The most significant addition is the new Reader which is accessed by clicking Reader which appears in the URL bar on supported pages or by going to View and then Enter Reader. It isn’t available on all sites but when it is, it allows you to read only the text in an article. It removes distracting ads, pictures and sidebars so that the experience is closer to that of reading a newspaper than before:

The other big changes are that Safari 5 is now 25% faster at loading Javascript than the previous version and extensive support for HTML5. I was a bit skeptical about the speed improvements at first but now that I’ve been running Safari 5 for a few hours, it has to be said it’s lightening fast. However, whether it’s twice as quick as Firefox and 3 percent quicker than Chrome as Apple claim, I’m not so sure but it is easily the fastest Safari ever. Greater HTML5 support is something developers will mainly appreciate allowing users to watch HTML5 video in full screen and access HTML5 geo-tagging.

There are many other great additions such as the possibility to use Bing as your default search engine in Safari:

And Safari is now far more intelligent at finding bookmarked and cached webpages searching for keywords within pages as you type them in the URL bar.

Give it a test drive and tell us what you think!